1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention may relate to an apparatus and method for transmitting an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) symbol in a radio access system (RAS) of an OFDMA system. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention may relate to an apparatus and method for transmitting an OFDMA symbol based on an adaptive control of a bandwidth limit parameter to enhance a downlink data rate of a WiBro RAS.
2. Background
In the next generation of radio access network such as wireless broadband (WiBro) and world interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) system, a signal is transmitted in the OFDMA scheme to provide a high data rate service to mobile users. The OFDMA scheme is advantageous since it can cope with problems of terrible frequency selective fading channels due to multi path fading in a radio access system with a high data rate. In the OFDMA scheme, the carriers that are appropriately arranged in the OFDMA signal may be received without interferences due to adjacent carriers. Although the sidebands of the adjacent carriers in the OFDMA signal are overlapped, the carriers are arranged to be orthogonal to each other in the entire OFDMA signal. Thus, they do not interfere with each other.
A guard interval is inserted between two adjacent OFDMA symbols to prevent inter symbol interference (ISI) due to interferences between the adjacent OFDMA symbols, as well as inter carrier interference (ICI) due to crosstalk between the adjacent sub carriers. The guard interval is longer than the maximal delay spread of the channel. Therefore, the symbol duration is a sum of the valid symbol duration, during which the data is actually transmitted, and the guard interval. The receiver removes the guard interval and then demodulates the data for the valid symbol duration. The last signal of the valid symbol duration is duplicated and inserted to the guard interval to maintain the orthogonal characteristics of carriers, which are referred to as cyclic prefix (CP).
The frequency spectrum of the OFDMA signal is a sum of sinc functions, each of which is a frequency function of each sub carrier. If the interval between the adjacent sub carriers is an integer multiple of a reciprocal of the valid symbol duration, then the orthogonal characteristics are maintained. However, the bad roll off characteristics of the sinc function causes the adjacent channel interference to generate. Thus, a band limit filter or a window such as root raised cosine (RRC) is used to remove or decrease out of band spectrum components in order to decrease the adjacent channel interference. Such a window or filter determines a spectrum mask that reduces the ISI and an error vector magnitude (EVM).
Until now, mobile communication systems have been developed to be compliant with specifications, with several reference parameters of the specifications such as a bandwidth limit parameter, being fixed. For example, in the transceiver of WiBro RAS (made by LG-Nortel), the radio frequency (RF) unit has been developed based on the fixed bandwidth limit parameter at the output of the modem.
A symbol is modulated to transmit in binary phase shift keying (BPSK), quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) or 64 QAM. Accordingly, the above four modulation schemes are utilized to adjust the data rate to maintain a highest downlink data rate as possible, if the received signal quality of a receiver is not sufficiently good due to noise (e.g., white noise) in the radio air or a long distance between the transmitter and the receiver such as a mobile station or relay. For example, the transmitter transmitting a symbol with 64 QAM lowers the data rate to 16 QAM in response to receiving continual repeat requests from the receiver such as a mobile station to maintain the received signal quality of the receiver at a certain level.
However, if the modulation scheme is changed to have a lower data rate for maintaining the received signal quality of the receiver at a certain level, then it is difficult to maintain transmitting data at a high data rate. The inconvenience of the mobile station users increases since a significant amount of data cannot be transmitted at a high data rate at a time. Further, the bandwidth cannot be efficiently utilized since the number of coded bits per sub carrier decreases.
Therefore, the objective of embodiments according to the present invention is to provide an apparatus and method for transmitting an OFDMA symbol to enable the highest downlink data rate. According to the embodiments, the bandwidth limit parameter may be first adjusted before the modulation scheme is changed to have a lower data rate.